Happy Birthday Dad!

Today is my father's 89th birthday.

He's been gone for 15 years, but his presence still surrounds us - more so now than in many of the intervening years. What has made his presence so palpable are images on the Internet of his one surviving sister Ollga, who at 77 never had the opportunity to know her brother.

My father's ties to his mother and two sisters in Albania were all but severed when the 18-year-old George joined his father in America in 1938.

Ollga was six at the time, losing both father and brother to a new life in a foreign country she would never know. He always referred to Ollga as "the little one" because in his mind she remained the six year old he left behind. George left communist Albania under the cover of night, traversing the mountains with fear of being discovered and forced to join the Albanian army. Instead, he joined the U.S. Army, instilling pride in the father who claimed his new homeland as his own much to the dismay of his wife and daughters.

I search Ollga's face for some resemblance to my father - the same nose, thin lips, high forehead, kindly brown eyes. Brother and sister separated by time and place - circumstances beyond my comprehension.

My father is gone, but Ollga remains the matriarch of her family, surrounded by sons and grandsons - cousins and nephews I know nothing about, but hope to someday meet. But for now, they remain strangers in a foreign land. And I am as much of a mystery to them as they are to me.